Here Comes the Sun

Roughly a month ago, fellow blogger Jansen Schmidt surprised and honored me  with the Sunshine Award. (Does she believe I have a sunny disposition? Clearly, she's never been a passenger in a car driven by me.) 

Jansen Schmidt is the nom de plume of my friend Patricia Rickrode. Patricia's talented in many areas: she's a writer, a stage actress, a Disney World/Disneyland aficionado who knows the parks inside out, a travel expert, and president of the Sacramento chapter of RWA. You'll find her blog here: http://jansenschmidt.wordpress.com Here's her Sunshine Award post: http://jansenschmidt.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/you-are-my-sunshine/

According to Jansen/Patricia, the Sunshine Award is best enjoyed when shared with others. Here are its rules:

Include the award’s logo (and rules) in a post on your blog. Simply cut and paste the photo at the top left into your own blog post.

Link to the person who nominated you.

Answer the ten questions below with your answers instead of mine.

Pass the award on to a bunch of “Sunshine Inspiring” bloggers.

Here are the questions:

Favorite Color:  Magenta (I wear this color but don't live with it. My house has a lot of cream, sage green, and pops of orange. In short, I clash with my house.)

Favorite Animal:  Cat 

Favorite Number:  Uh oh. I can't reveal this as I've used it in too many passwords

Favorite Non Alcoholic Drink:  Coffee. How I love it.

Favorite Alcoholic Drink: Red wine

Facebook or Twitter:  Neither

Passions:  Writing, reading, traveling, trip-planning, cooking, Zumba 

Prefer Getting or Giving Gifts:  Giving.

Favorite City:  I like something about every city I've visited. Favorites include San Francisco, New York, Charleston, San Antonio, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Munich, Uzes, France, Ennis, Ireland, Passau, Germany, and I could go on and on. 

Favorite TV Show:  Top Chef, Project Runway, Call the Midwife

And now, here are my nominations for the Sunshine Award:

Linda Barrett blogs about starting over, a subject she understands. She moved halfway across the country twice, traded traditional publishing for self-publishing, and is a two-time breast-cancer survivor. http://www.linda-barrett.com/blog/

Fiorella Plum is the pen name of an Austin-area writer. Her daily (you read that right) posts are short but wide-ranging. Fio writes about people in the news, her dog's obedience-training mishaps, amateur theatricals, Texas politics, and the armadillos plowing through her garden. http://fiorellaplum.blogspot.com

I write and read women's fiction and have a soft spot for British or Irish writers like Maggie O'Farrell, JoJo Moyes, Rachel Joyce, and the late Maeve Binchy. That said, science-fiction writer Lynette Burrows is responsible for wrenching me from Aga stoves to space-landing equipment, and from Devon to Mars via her blog, Of Martians and Marshmallows. By day, Lynette cares for the tiniest, most fragile babies. By night, her imagination sends her into space. http://lynettemburrows.com/blog/  

My thanks, again, to Jansen/Patricia for brightening my day with an award I aspire to earn.

Reading through Good Times and Bad

This post is about the authors whose books accompanied me through turning points, pulled me out of down times, and waltzed with me when things went well.

A post that promises to be long and winding deserves a soundtrack, don't you think? I give you the people of Open Books, a non-profit that promotes literacy and runs a bookstore in Chicago. They want to encourage those of us who've grown overfond of our e-readers to get out, browse the shelves, and pick up a print book. 

(Feel free to bust a move as you read on.) Earlier this month, Patricia Rickrode, who writes as Jansen Schmidt, gave me the Booker Award (not to be confused with the Man Booker Prize, ha!). Patricia also threw down a challenge: name my five favorite books and nominate three other bloggers for the award.

No way could I narrow down my favorite books to five, so I'm doing what Patricia did: naming influential authors. Each of my five taught me something/gave me something I needed at a particular point in my life. Just as a certain scarf, scent, or piece of jewelry evokes a particular time and place for me, so do these writers.

Mary Stewart – I must have been fourteen or fifteen when I discovered Mary Stewart and THE MOON SPINNERS. The windmill on the cover and exotic setting of Crete hooked me. Most of all, I remember a scene in which the hero and heroine drag themselves from the water. The heroine was wearing a bathing suit, but when she and the hero embraced, she thinks, "We might as well have been naked." That sentence switched on my sexuality. One minute I was a kid, and the next, I wasn't. While I loved THIS ROUGH MAGIC and AIRS ABOVE THE GROUND, and MY BROTHER MICHAEL, THE MOON SPINNERS was my first Stewart and is unforgettable because it opened me to possibility. An ordinary (although lovely and plucky) woman could stumble into and get herself out of danger--while falling in love. Stewart's settings also gave me a permanent hunger for travel.

Maeve Binchy – I'd been an English major in college, which meant I read so much literary fiction, I forgot why I liked to read. My mother passed along Maeve Binchy's first book, LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE, published thirty-two years ago. Binchy pulled me out of my mired-in-first-job funk and reminded me why I enjoy slipping into the lives of others and experiencing their problems, adventures, and triumphs. Binchy's books would accompany me through motherhood, two careers, and inspire me to write fiction.

Nora Roberts – I was a mom, working at a job that valued repartee, cynicism, and zeal for working long hours. Alas, I'm lousy at repartee, passed skepticism but failed at cynicism, and was wracked with guilt over the hours spent away from my family. Enter Nora Roberts. The first novel I read might have been SACRED SINS in 1987. Her stories offered escape, a fast pace, and lean prose—all appreciated by a working mom with little free time.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips – HEAVEN, TEXAS wasn't Susan Elizabeth Phillips' first book but was the first of hers I read. It was released in paperback in April, 1995, the month and year my then-employer, The Houston Post, printed its last newspaper. If one finds herself in unemployment hell, a feel-good story is as necessary as food and water. SEP came through for me again eleven years ago this week. After the Twin Towers fell, I turned to THIS HEART OF MINE. The story's heroine is a children's book author, and I clung to Daphne the Bunny and Benny the Badger as much as I leaned on the church-camp-turned-B&B setting with its pastel cottages and water views. This book was an emotional refuge for me, and I'm not exaggerating when I say I'd finish it one evening and re-start it the next.

My choice for writer number five is many writers. During Houston's hot, humid summers, I count on British and Irish writers for relief. Why? Cool, rainy settings refresh me when my front lawn is so dry it crackles. When the temps are in the nineties, I want books from Marian Keyes, Lucy Dillon, Maggie O'Farrell, Jojo Moyes, Marcia Willett, and the list goes on and on.

I haven't singled out favorite Houston-based writers, favorite writers I know personally, or favorite writers I've taken classes from because it's so hard to pick and choose from those groups, I didn't try.

The Booker Award  goes to the following bloggers: Lark Haward of THIS blog, Kay Hudson, and Karen McFarland. It never expires, so there's no pressure to post about it anytime soon.

Readers, your turn. What writer or book provided inpiration, comfort, or a kick in the pants at a particular point in your life?

Versatile? Me? (Switches from Tap-Dancing to Juggling)

Lynn Kelley, children's book author (Curse at Zala Manor. Secret of Haunted Bog) and creator of the Random Acts of Weirdness blog has conferred upon me the Versatile Blogger Award. Whoa! I'm thrilled although my so-called versatility is due to an inability to focus rather than talent.

Like most awards, this one comes with rules and responsibilities. For the Versatile Blogger Award, the rules are as follows:

Thank the blogger who nominated you!
Add the award pic to your blog post.
Nominate fifteen fellow bloggers and let them know about it!
Share seven random things about yourself.

I'll nominate seven bloggers today and eight more Friday. By dividing up my nominations, I give myself time and space to able to say a few words about each pick. But, before we get to my picks, here are seven random things you didn't know (and may not have wanted to know) about me:

1. I'm a firstborn. The eldest child's oft-noted quest for perfection doesn't extend to my appearance or housekeeping, but it affects my writing. The trait's good in that I aim high, and bad in that I always fall short.
2. The New York Times Sunday magazine has a feature called "Diagnosis" that introduces a medical patient and his ailment and shows the steps leading to a diagnosis. The feature could be the Rosetta Stone the way I pore over it and try to out-think the medical professionals even though I'm a wuss who has to close her eyes every time a TV surgeon cuts into a patient. Not surprisingly, I'm the kind of viewer who shouts out diagnosis suggestions to TV's Dr. Gregory House. No wonder the guy's cranky.
3. Amazon Prime member? C'est moi. Some people think a $79 per year Prime membership is for those with money to burn, but it's for forgetful types who don't remember the birthdays and special occasions of far-flung friends and relations until it's too late for anything but second-day shipping. My Prime membership pays for itself in saved shipping costs, and, at one point, I feared Amazon wouldn't let me renew because of the number of boxes I had it ship hither and yon. My husband set me straight. "You think Amazon won't renew your membership because you bought too much?"
4. I have ten place settings of Fiestaware in ten different colors. When I reach into the cabinet and pull out a cup for my morning coffee, I never know which color I'm going to get. Will it be turquoise, plum, chocolate?
5. When we moved into our first apartment, I told my husband we'd make all the furniture/decorating decisions together except one: I got to decide where and what pictures we put on the walls.
6. I've lived more years in Texas than in my home state of New Jersey.
7. When Older Daughter was in scouting, she insisted I accompany her troop on camping trips. I hated the first one, but then I fell for sleeping in tents, cooking over campfires, and hiking in the woods. When OD left Girl Scouts, I was the one who missed sleeping under the stars.

Enough about me! Let me introduce you to seven blogs (Introductions to the remaining eight will come soon.) by writers who have inspired me, and/or made me laugh, think, and nod in recognition.

· Tim L. O'Brien's Static in the Airwaves Tim is a writer, husband, father, and friend who chronicles events such as as the reunion of buddies since high school and reflects on subjects that range from how to raise kids who read to the news his son-in-law is deploying to Afghanistan.
· Kiss and Thrill is a new blog started by the 2011 RWA Golden Heart finalists in romantic suspense. The blog's inaugural author interview was with RS best-seller Allison Brennan, and an interview with Brenda Novak is set for tomorrow, December 6. I'm waving at two of the blog's writers: Sarah Andre and Lena Diaz.
· Wild, Wicked, and Wacky Suzan Harden is self-published and proud of it. Her blog offers information for those interested in the indie route, along with movie reviews, guest interviews, song clips, and more. She's a lawyer by training and knows her Gaga from her gag order.
· Fiorella Plum is the nom de plume of an Austin-area blogger who posts every day on subjects ranging from her pastor's reaction to a mugger to what's new in the Luann comic strip.
· Kay Hudson writes about whatever strikes her fancy: books, television, and cats that fall asleep in the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey.
· Jansen Schmidt's Blogging from the Edge of Eternity is new, just two entries so far, but the posts capture Schmidt's sly humor and enjoyment of life.
· Kecia's Blog is the work of Kecia Adams, a writer, editor, and Navy veteran. The blog's new, but the first post is the POV of a thoughtful mom, and the second is that of a thoughtful citizen of the world.

Hope you like the blogs mentioned above. Lynn, thanks a million for the award.